Audacity Forum

I did a little digging around into past users experiences with getting the audacity box to pop up, but then the program failing to launch further.

You say you haven't made any hardware or software changes, but computers often update things without telling you, and sometimes the little things can slip our minds.

I'm gonna give you a couple of steps, but I don't know if any of this applies to your system because I've never used what you've got.
Open up your task manager. Click the services tab. Find 'Audiosrv' and 'AudioEndpointBuilder' and stop those files. This -should- disable your audio from working altogether until reset, and possibly will need a system reset after it.

While audio is disabled, try to start Audacity. If it opens, that means you probably have an issue with a recording or playback device somewhere along the lines. One user had a TV watching device hooked up to their computer that was causing the same issue, for example. It could be some new software installed, too, or maybe a setting was changed somewhere that's making your mic or speakers cause an error when Audacity tries to access it.

Rockingham01 wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 08, 2019 3:49 pm

Something else that's odd: after it doesn't open, if I click it again I get this message: "The system has detected that another copy of Audacity is running.

I think I misinterpreted what you were saying here. Did that message only come up the second time that you try to launch Audacity? If so, then that's a bit of a red herring (not the cause of the problem).

Assuming that's the case:

1. Reboot your computer.
2. Open the hidden folder: Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\audacity\
3. From that folder, delete the three files:
   • audacity.cfg
   • pluginregistry.cfg
   • pluginsettings.cfg

Then try to launch Audacity.

Well, after doing a little digging around, I finally got Audacity to open by deleting the pluginregistry.cfg and pluginsettings.cfg files in the AppData\Roaming\Audacity section and then restarting. The FFmpeg Library didn't reinstall upon restart so I had to download them again. Also, none of my VST plugins reinstalled either, so I'll have to load all of them in again, but at least the program is up and running, for now. Thank you everybody for your help and input.

Hi Steve, I saw your message after I posted. I must have been on the same wave. I got all of the information you posted on the Audacity website. Thank you for your hard work. I also found out you have to load all VST plugins into the Audacity plugins folder manually. There is no re-scanning for VST plugins feature anymore in the edit section as there was previously.